Our own Carolyn Walker sits down with CEO of Ovation (the #1 guest feedback platform for restaurants) Zack Oates on his podcast: Give an Ovation. Carolyn rips off the mask, Scooby-Doo-style, to expose “The Forgotten Ones” and then solves the mystery of why they’re so important for every restaurant’s brand. Jack then persuades Carolyn to regale him with tales of her wild early years in restaurant branding, and her unexpected journey from freelance consultant to CEO of Response. Finally, they give “Ovations” to two restaurant brands that are disrupting the industry in ways you won’t believe.
Listen to the podcast here.
Or scroll down for the full transcript. Bon appétit!
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Zack Oates:
What’s up, Zach Oates here, author, entrepreneur, and customer relationship guru. Welcome to Give An Ovation, growth strategies for restaurants and retailers where we find industry leaders to share their secrets to grow your business. This podcast is sponsored by Ovation, the actionable guest feedback tool that works on or off premise and is easy, real time, and actually drives revenue. Learn more at ovationup.com.
Welcome to another edition of Give An Ovation. I have got a guest coming in with a jetpack of experience. She has worked with Kraft, Frito-Lay, Saatchi & Saatchi advertising, Darden Restaurant Group, and now the CEO and Managing Partner at Response Marketing. She has worked with brands like Logitech, Amazon, Black and Decker, hundreds, thousands, maybe billions of more. Welcome to the show, Carolyn Walker.
Carolyn Walker:
Hi Zach, thanks for having me.
Zack Oates:
Absolutely, my pleasure. So first of all, let’s dive into Response Marketing. Tell me a little bit about what it is, why it started, and the journey, because from your LinkedIn bio looks like it has been a journey.
Carolyn Walker:
It’s been a wild ride to say the least. So maybe we need to unpack it by going all the way back to the beginning. So I went to Northeastern University for college and that’s a cooperative education school. So you go to school full-time, then work full-time. And so through their program, which is amazing, I got two years of full-time work experience and my degree. And my work experience was with amazing brands. I worked for Sami-Burke, which is a research company. I went to work for Kraft General Foods on the Birds Eye business. I went to Frito-Lay, they had just acquired Smart Food, I worked on Smart Food and did gorilla marketing and trade marketing for them. And then my last job was with Saatchi & Saatchi. And funny story about that is the chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi at the time was Ed Wax and he was a graduate of Northeastern University and brought the co-op education program back to Saatchi & Saatchi. So I was the first co-op student at Saatchi in 15 years. It was crazy.
Zack Oates:
Oh, wow.
Carolyn Walker:
And worked on the Helene Curtis account working on Finesse Haircare, which was amazing. So had this great background, my education and had worked on great brands through that. And then after I graduated I went back to work for Saatchi and worked on huge brands like Mylanta. I know more about gastrointestinal problems than I really care to admit. And also worked on adult Tylenol for a time. And during that time I was kind of like, “Huh, what do I really want to do here?” I felt like I was so focused just on advertising. I wanted to see more of the marketing picture, was thinking about getting my MBA and applied to this job that was posted in Ad Age, I’m not kidding you, was like a one by one square tile in the back of Ad Age and it was for a marketing specialist with Darden Restaurant working on the Red Lobster brand. And at the time, actually it was General Mills restaurants, if you remember. It was a long time ago.
Zack Oates:
Oh, yeah.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, so they hired me as a marketing coordinator and was doing a lot with kind of budgets and billings and they were giving me special projects here and there. I loved it, by the way, I loved the restaurant industry. I loved learning a lot more about the restaurant industry and made my way up there. I worked in national promotions for quite a long time, like six, seven years, both in the US and in Canada. And really, I feel like I was kind of classically trained in brand management and promotional marketing from them. And General Mills restaurants or Darden Restaurants was really, at least when I was there, it was very marketing driven. We were on air 50 weeks a year. It was crazy.
Zack Oates:
Wait, what were the two weeks you weren’t on air?
Carolyn Walker:
I know. It was like the holiday. That was it. And we were off-air.
Zack Oates:
Oh, really? You didn’t do, no advertising?
Carolyn Walker:
Well it’s because it was so competitive right during the Christmas time and people are staying home during the holidays.
Zack Oates:
Interesting. By the way, with Darden, I got to like quick little aside right here, were you at all involved in getting their cheddar biscuit mix into retail?
Carolyn Walker:
No, I was not involved with that.
Zack Oates:
Because I am so grateful for them.
Carolyn Walker:
I feel smart move because people love their Cheddar Bay Biscuits. And actually I’ve been thinking a lot lately about their Cheddar Bay Biscuits and wondering why more wasn’t done with them. And I wish I could go back in time and put my marketing manager hat on and have come up with more promotional items that use the Cheddar Bay Biscuits or at least that recipe.
Zack Oates:
But I got to tell you though, I now get a lot of my Red Lobster kick from just buying the biscuits and I like the way my wife makes them more than I like the way that Red Lobster makes it.
Carolyn Walker:
At the store?
Zack Oates:
Yeah. Because she doubles the cheese in it slightly under cooks it.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. Delish.
Zack Oates:
It’s magical. And a little more butter on top, right?
Carolyn Walker:
Absolutely.
Zack Oates:
Anyway, needless to say. Okay, let’s get back on track. But although I did think that, James Walker, friend of the show, he was with Nathan’s Famous and they’ve got such a strong retail presence as well as the restaurants and I think that it plays well.
Carolyn Walker:
Absolutely. It’s another avenue of sales, right?
Zack Oates:
Every time I open up my pantry, I see Red Lobster logo right there.
Carolyn Walker:
Absolutely. And part of great branding and strong brands is having mental availability and part of that mental availability is the physical availability that you’ve got by opening your cabinet door. So could not agree with you more there. Anyway, so I was there for seven years, loved it, did all kinds of amazing work with them. One of the best promotions I worked on was their bottomless crab bucket. It was insane. The crab was coming out of the water at $2 a pound and we did this awesome promotion that had people wrapped around the buildings. It was really awesome.
And then I decided, it was the late nineties, I decided that I wanted to go from a big corporation to more of a startup situation. And I went to Sandella’s. And Sandella’s was a small concept at the time, probably four or five company owned units. And I’ll tell you, I never got my MBA, but I feel like I got my MBA through that experience with Sandella’s. It was a wild ride. We went from company owned, we started franchising, we had issues finding great operators in great locations. And then 9/11 happened and we really kind of retrenched and took a hard look at the brand and decided that through some conversations with other brands, that maybe we need to scale our concept down and start partnering with others.
So at the time this idea of co-branded spaces was big and we weren’t looking to go into spaces together, but we were saying, hey, you know, might be a complimentary brand, like a smoothie shop or an ice cream shop or a coffee place that could use Sandella’s, which was sandwiches and pizzas and quesadillas and paninis and things like that, a complimentary day part offering brand next to you to help you with your ability to have more sales out of your location.
And so we did that and we were starting to get some success. And from a marketing perspective, it was way back, email was just kind of starting, and we did a lot of direct mail, and one of our marketing pieces ended up with Lackmann Culinary Services, which is a contract feeder out in Long Island. And they said, “Hey, your concept fits in 50 square feet. We have this space in Adelphi University where all the kids come at the student center and they come to eat. Could you fit in 50 square feet and take the space where we’re doing $0 out of and do something with it?” And we said, absolutely. So we go and install our unit at Adelphi.
Zack Oates:
50 square feet?
Carolyn Walker:
50 square feet, we shrunk the whole thing down.
Zack Oates:
And you’re doing paninis and sandwiches and quesadillas and pizzas?
Carolyn Walker:
Yes. And no ventilation because we did everything on this little conveyor toaster oven thing. It worked beautifully. It was really genius actually. And colleges at the time were looking for branded concepts and it’s tough to come up with a concept on your own. And so we license it to them and it was really, really affordable. And so we put our unit in there and lo and behold, that little 50 square foot area did as much on Adelphi University as our 1200 square foot units were doing on the corner of Main.
And we were like, holy moly, there’s something to this. And I quickly became part of NACUFS, which is the National Association of College and University Food Service, and got their list and started mailing out to them and we thought we need to prove this out. And the next call we got was from Louisiana State University. Which their food service was run by Chartwells, which is a division of Compass Group, which is one of the largest contract feeders in the world. And they called us up and said, “Hey, we have two Taco Bell expresses, we don’t want two, we don’t need two, have this one spot, it was much bigger than the one at Adelphi, it was probably about…
Zack Oates:
55 square feet.
Carolyn Walker:
It might have been like 150 or something like that.
Zack Oates:
Okay, so a conference room. You went from a closet to a conference room. Very cool.
Carolyn Walker:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. That’s really funny. And so we installed in LSU and because it’s such a much bigger university, much bigger student center, we did five times the volume at LSU as we did Adelphi and knew that we were onto something. And so anyway, long story short, we ended up growing the concept from back when I started, it was five company owned units to we had about over a hundred licensed units across the country, mainly in non-traditional locations like colleges. So it was really cool.
Zack Oates:
And apparently in people’s trunks. That is such an interesting opportunity and just an interesting concept, that you could have shut down. You could have closed yourself, you could have said exactly, hey, this isn’t working. But when you look at it, it’s not that what you’re doing is wrong, it’s that maybe you just haven’t found the right offer to the right people yet.
Carolyn Walker:
That’s exactly right.
Zack Oates:
And I think that’s such a fascinating concept, just what a great case study there.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, it was an unbelievable pivot. And it’s funny that you say that. Maybe you looking back on it or you looking at it now from your outside perspective, it’s like, wow, that’s amazing. But I really felt like at the time we didn’t have a choice, it was like survive. We needed to survive. And what are you going to do to survive? And so it was a hard pivot.
And if you think back to one of our challenges, which was finding great operators, when we partnered with contract feeders, these guys guys operate food service all day long, 24/7. So we had amazing operations, we had a great product, we knew we had a great product. You married that with great operations and these locations that have captive audiences, how can you not succeed? So it really was a home run and incredibly successful. And by the way, when the students got exposed to the brand and saw the brand, they then became interested in, okay, well why don’t we take this off campus? And so after I left, they started developing units outside, again, outside of the campus environment or those non-traditional locations.
Zack Oates:
I love that story and I think that that’s just such a… the concept of resilience. I think about what Ovation went through during COVID. And we used to be servicing a lot of industries. We used to be doing a lot of things. I mean at one point we were working with summer sales companies and we were working with spas and we were working with anyone who would pay us, anyone that had a front door. And so we had so many different types of people that we were working with. And we even at one point even had our own loyalty system. We were doing so much in the market, and with COVID to what exactly what you were talking about, we didn’t have a choice. We had to really focus in and we had to do one thing, solve one problem for one type of customer.
And looking at the market and looking at the things that people were doing and looking at our passions, it was feedback for restaurants. And here we are, we’ve 10xed in the last couple years after making that pivot. But that’s what it took. And out of that necessity came the innovation. And a lot of times innovation doesn’t mean more, sometimes it means less. It means cutting out the things that aren’t the
core focus of what you’re doing or it’s about taking the things you have to the right market. So anyway, just a great case study and resilience and pressing forwards. That’s really cool Carolyn.
Carolyn Walker:
Thank you. So from there I left Sandella’s and wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do next. And I went to Response, believe it or not, as a freelancer. So I call myself the accidental entrepreneur because I did not intend to own an agency. But here I am many years later and own the agency. So I went there, I started as a freelancer, got hired full-time, became a partner within a year, became managing partner within three years. And then I bought the original guys out in 2009.
Zack Oates:
So you literally went from a freelancer to CEO?
Carolyn Walker:
Yes, I did. Sounds crazy.
Zack Oates:
As one does, Carolyn. So my question for you in no short order, is when’s the memoir coming out?
Carolyn Walker:
That’s so funny because I just had a call with, actually I just canceled the call, but I’m rescheduling a call with a ghost writer because I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. For real, legitimately.
Zack Oates:
What’s the working title? Do you have a couple ideas?
Carolyn Walker:
So I had one idea, and I don’t know if it’s that great, but my grandfather was also an ad guy. He had his own agency in New York and his nickname for us, as his grandkids, we called him Nuni. And he loved these Stella D’oro cookies, the breakfast cookies, he loved those. And my grandmother used to call them Nuni cookies. And I thought, oh my gosh. Well new cookies in the digital world means the path of where you’ve been. And so I had this idea of calling this book that I write Nuni cookies. So I don’t know.
Zack Oates:
Oh, okay. I like that.
Carolyn Walker:
Like the trail of where you’ve been.
Zack Oates:
Yeah, no, I like that. I mean that’s going real meta there. I know because I wrote a book…
Carolyn Walker:
I don’t know, it’s probably a terrible idea.
Zack Oates:
Well, no, no, I just know the process of coming up with the title. I mean, I have a book, it’s called Dating Never Works Until It Does. And it was one of those things where that was probably the hundredth name that I had come up with for the book. And anyway, but I just think it’s so tough to do that because especially if it’s more of a memoir based, it’s like, oh, there’s so much, what’s the final message? So anyway, I was like, for me, I want people to pick up the book and to be like, have you read that book, Do What You Love and You’ll Never Work a Day in Your Life?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, yeah.
Zack Oates:
That’s the book title. And there’s a funny SNL sketch where someone was like, “Hey, did you read this book?” And she’s like, “No, I just kind of read the title and I decided to eat pizza for a living.” And anyway, I was like, that’s what I want people to do. I want people to look at the book and be like, okay, I get it and then put it down. But anyway, I love that idea.
So I mean, we are getting crunched on time here, but this is such a great conversation. In advance, Carolyn, I’m going to have to invite you to come back because there’s so much more I want to talk to you about. But one thing I want to get to, and if we don’t get to anything else, I want to spend the rest of the time talking about this, who are the forgotten ones in restaurant brand building and marketing?
Carolyn Walker:
That’s a great question. And so we talk about the forgotten ones actually in relation to the staff. And so when I think restauranters think about their brand, they think about, well, what’s the logo? What’s the tagline? And what does my website look like? And all of this stuff. And they forget about the people who should be the real stewards of the brand. The people who are making the food and prepping the food are on the front lines with the guests.
They need to know the why. Why does this company, what does this brand exist? What are we trying to do? What’s our mission and vision? How do we make unforgettable experiences for our guests? And if you’re not doing that, then you’re really missing out. You’re missing out on an opportunity to build a relationship with your guests and trust with your guests and give those people, those stewards of the brand, the autonomy and the power. Empower them with your brand message so that they can do the right things when it comes to being hospitable to your guests.
Zack Oates:
Because at the end of the day, the best marketing that you have, are your people. And what do you want to teach your people to do? You want to teach your people to help your guests feel important.
Carolyn Walker:
Exactly.
Zack Oates:
I often talk about the ladder of loyalty. Where on the bottom rung is convenience, on the middle rung is consistency, and on the top rung is connection. And that is where you get, not just convenience will get them in one time, consistency will get them in a few times, connection will keep them for a lifetime.
Carolyn Walker:
A hundred percent.
Zack Oates:
And in order to have your employees connect with your guests, guess what folks? You’ve got to connect with your employees, right?
Carolyn Walker:
Definitely. There’s so many people who overlook that. And it’s funny because I was listening to Full Comp and Josh was talking about one of the things that he would’ve done differently. And he said, using those pre-shift rallies, or we called them Red Lobster, alley rallies, differently and getting them to be jazzed about the brand and how do we execute on hospitality? How do we make these moments of delight for our guests? He said he would’ve used them totally differently. It’s not like, oh, sell more of the dessert, or here’s the special. It’s not about that. It’s about what’s the brand? Why are we doing this? And really, like I said, empowering that group to be stewards of the brand.
Zack Oates:
And a great book to read, if you haven’t read it, is Four Hour Work Week. And not that I necessarily think that that’s that possible if you have a couple of restaurants, but maybe it is, right? I talked to consultants, that’s their whole job is to help restaurant owners step away from their restaurant. Because I can’t tell you how many restaurant owners I’ve talked to who haven’t taken a vacation in five years, right? But at the end of the day, one of the things he talks about is this word that you keep mentioning, is empower. And when you empower your staff to create a great guest experience, the ironic thing is that they feel fulfilled by filling others. And so when they’re helping others to get the right food, have a good experience, they are happier. And so when you empower them, you’re actually creating a better guest experience because they’re then happier and more willing to do it.
And I love that idea of the forgotten ones in restaurant marketing. Such a good insight. And just for our listeners to know, that was something that Carolyn, before our call, emailed to me to ask about. So I’m not just very insightful asking about this. This was a prompt to make me look good, but I got to give the credit to Carolyn because it’s a great concept. It’s a great question. It’s a great framework. I think wrapping up, and again, I want to get you back on so we can talk more about the guest experience and tactics and everything, but any shout-outs you want to give? Anyone that you feel deserves an ovation in the restaurant industry?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, I have a few, and I’ll go through them quickly. One is Planta, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. They’re out of Canada. They started in Toronto and I have not been to one yet. I’m dying to go to one. But they’re more fine dining vegan. And I just think that they’re doing an exceptional job at making vegan more accessible. And it’s more like, it’s a really incredible fine dining experience and it just happens to be vegan.
Zack Oates:
Yeah. Well, I mean, anywhere that has a 4.5 stars with 1,840 reviews, it’s probably pretty good. So I’m putting them on my list.
Carolyn Walker:
So they’re on my list. They do a great job on their site too, by the way. The second is First Watch. And I just think they’re doing a killer job owning that daytime cafe space. And they’re building an incredibly strong brand, one with purpose and distinction and relevance. And they’re doing the hard work and building the brand kind of day in and day out and being true to who they are and what their core is. And by the way, I also think that they’re doing an incredible job winning the war on talent as well.
And so they’re talking about, they say, no nights ever, and you join for the hours and you stay for the people. And it’s like, to me, I feel like some people who are maybe burnt on the restaurant industry and working late nights and weekends and all of that stuff, think about this as a wow, this is a different concept that allows me to have maybe more of a normal schedule. So I thought that was really smart.
And then I’ll lastly mention Chipotle. It may be a little bit of a cop out, but I just think that they do an amazing job at having a balance between brand marketing and performance marketing. And so they just do that brilliantly. And if they had not been true to their brand and kept their brand marketing going, they would’ve never survived the crisis in 2015, 2016 that they did with the E. coli breakout. And so I just really admire the work that they’ve done, and they haven’t gone into the war on price at all. It really is about who there are as a brand and then to get the frequency up, they introduce new products. And they’re not talking about product at a price. It’s not the 4.99 burrito. It’s this new cool thing that you should come in for. So, anyways, I really admire them quite a bit.
Zack Oates:
So Carolyn, how do people find and follow you and Response Marketing?
Carolyn Walker:
So the best way is to go to our website, which is response.agency. You’ll find all of our social handles there. Really, it’s the best way and also I’m always open to talking to anyone, so if you want to email me, it’s carolyn@response.agency.
Zack Oates:
Well, for inspiring us all to get to the moon with your fully fueled jetpack and amazing life journey, and for giving us a sample of your Nuni cookies, today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us at Give an Ovation, Carolyn.
Carolyn Walker:
Thanks, Zach.
Zack Oates:
Glad you’re with us today and thank you. Thank you to the risk-takers, the troublemakers, the crazies who are keeping this world clothed and fed. You are the ones who deserve an ovation. Again, this podcast was sponsored by Ovation. To see how we can help you grow your business, go to ovationup.com. Don’t forget to subscribe. And as always, remember to give someone in your life an ovation today.